Sororities

One of the enjoyable parts of running this website is discovering other Delta Delta Delta (Tri Delta) sorority sisters. Over the years I’ve met Tri Deltas from different chapters around the country. It provides an instant bond. Why? Because when I meet another Tri Delta I know we have one thing in common – our ritual. No matter where a Tri Delta is initiated, she experiences the same ritual.

We use the same ritual book full of timeless ideals handed down for generations. If I say Alpha Theta Phi to her, she knows what that means. If we talk about pansies, she knows what they represent. She knows what the three stars on our lovely badge represent. The story of the pine tree. What a pearl means. Even if we’ve never met and are generations apart, we share the bond of our ritual.

Well, we did. But our lovely ritual has been gutted and rewritten, sacrificed to the political correctness of the cultural maelstrom.

It isn’t only Tri Delta’s ritual. The 26 sororities that make up the National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) are all rewriting and reworking every aspect of their membership. I’m of the opinion that these changes will actually bring about the destruction of NPC member groups.

Why?

Because the NPC sororities have just about reached the point of no return. They are in the process of making decisions that I believe will determine whether their groups survive and thrive or slowly wither away and enter the dustbin of history. We’re watching in real time the destruction of another largely American institution undermined and destroyed by progressive wokeness.

Let’s look at just two examples. The first will be my own organization, Tri Delta. The second will be Kappa Delta.

Gutting the Tri Delta Ritual

I became aware of the changes to my own sorority ritual this year. Sororities have been “updating” their rituals that are 100-150 years old in order to make them more acceptable. Why? Because many of them (including my own) are full of Christian symbolism, Scripture, and imagery.

As Delta Gamma recently described it on their Facebook page, the rituals include “white ideals and perspectives” in them. And these “white ideals and perspectives” must be removed. Now that whiteness is considered the root of all evil, it must be removed wherever it is found by those in the woke mob – even if those “white” Christian perspectives are actually shared by billions of people across time and the world. For the purposes of making NPC groups embrace progressivism in all its forms, it is necessary to erase any aspect of Christianity that made these organizations strong for generations.

Through a series of events, a Tri Delta sister shared with me that this has already been happening in our own ritual in recent years. Because I don’t live near a collegiate chapter and am no longer involved on the national level, I was not aware of this. Members of other sororities reached out to me privately in another setting to confirm this is happening in their own organizations.

This summer I was able to watch the Tri Delta ritual online during the virtual convention. It is a ritual with which I am very familar. I memorized the ritual when I was chapter president so I could look the women in the eye while initiating them and not have my head buried in the ritual book. I also presided over the initiation ritual multiple times. Because of this, I still remember vast portions of the ritual and I knew which parts would be gutted. I was correct. The beautiful imagery, legends, and meaning of the ritual were completely gone. This was further confirmed when another Tri Delta sister offered to send me a PDF copy of our ritual from a number of decades ago.

I no longer share the same ritual with my Tri Delta sisters. We don’t share the same understanding of what it means to be a Tri Delta and why our founders chose the symbolism they did. New members are being initiated with a weak, increasingly politically correct ritual.

The Tri Delta ritual will not survive the gutting of “white ideals and perspectives.” As sororities become more woke, they will steadily eliminate every reference to anything Christian in their ritual. In the end, they will end up a woman’s group with no real traditions and no connections. The Tri Delta ritual cannot exist if the woke mob demands the removal of everything Christian, conservative, traditional, and what they incorrectly deem “white.”

I think most sorority alumnae have no idea this is happening to their rituals. Most are too busy working, taking care of their children, etc. to know about developments in their sorority. If they haven’t been involved in a alumnae chapter or are unable to volunteer with a collegiate chapter, they have no idea their lovely ritual no longer exists and is but a shell of what they were privileged to be a part of.

Kappa Delta Sorority and Amy Coney Barrett

The other example I’m going to share happened just in the past few days with Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court. It was this that made me decide to finally finish this partially written post and publish it.

Amy Coney Barrett is a member of Kappa Delta’s chapter at Rhodes College. While thousands of sorority women have served in local, state, and national government, the Supreme Court is on an entirely different level. Kappa Delta has every right to be proud that one of their sisters has achieved such an incredible level of professional achievement while also enjoying a lovely and fulfilling personal life.

Kappa Delta shared Amy Coney Barrett’s accomplishment on their official Facebook page earlier this week. Instead of celebrating their sister, the Woke mob of Kappa Delta who disagrees with parts of Amy Coney Barrett’s life and viewpoint was outraged and made sure the Kappa Delta leadership knew. Sadly, Kappa Delta leadership gave in to the angry mob, took down the message, and offered up an apology.

As you can imagine, this backtracking and throwing one of their accomplished sisters under the bus greatly offended the many members who were proud of Barrett and what she had achieved. They expressed that Kappa Delta was telling them that their views as Conservatives, Christians, and such were invalid. As I wrote in my forum when I shared this information in Kappa Delta Sorority recognizes sister Amy Coney Barrett on Facebook and then caves to the Woke mob:

Kappa Delta Sorority issued a congratulatory statement on Facebook to recognize their sister, Amy Coney Barrett, and her tremendous professional achievement.

Meltdown ensued by those on the Left and, of course, in the name of diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE), they had to take it down.

Because diversity only matters if you are on the Left. Diversity of opinion doesn’t apply to Conservatives, Christians, or anyone else not sufficiently a part of the Woke Religion.

I don’t see this ending well for Kappa Delta. Bending the knee to the mob never ends well. We know this because it has been confirmed time and again. The reality is that critical race theory, wokeness, etc. destroy organizations from within. It pits members against each other and alienates the average member. It literally eats organizations alive as the topics become the focus of everything that happens and every choice that is made. (See the videos I shared in the comments.) I wonder if the Kappa Delta leadership truly understands the significance of the choice they made when they chose to distance themselves from their own sister and how that will impact everything in their organization going forward.

Who Are the Keepers of Tradition?

I think there is an important element in this unfolding drama in NPC sororities that leadership is missing. In a desire to appease the woke faction of their organizations, sorority leadership is forgetting that the keepers of tradition in a culture are the Conservatives. As leaders make decisions that alienate, dismiss, and even force out their conservative sisters, they will be pushing out the very women who would keep their organization alive and moving forward.

By very definition, Conservatives desire to conserve what is best and most helpful in a culture. This includes the conservative members of sororities who see tremendous long-term value in maintaining what has made the NPC sorority experience unique while thoughtfully and carefully making changes that serve the organization and membership as it moves forward.

What happens when sororities run off the majority of their conservative sisters? In a relatively short time you will be left with a glorified woman’s club (sorry, womxn’s club) that is indistinguishable from the rest of the groups on campus for “people with vaginas” and people who wish they had vaginas. Make no mistake that is where this is headed and you have to be either willfully blind not to see it or making deliberate choices to move your organization in that very direction. When the conservative members have all been run off, the NPC sororities will end up progressive women’s groups that resemble nothing that our sisters in the past would even recognize.

Unlike when NPC groups were being founded as a means of support for the few women attending college, women’s groups are now a dime a dozen on campus. You can find a group for women on virtually any topic, belief, cause, etc. because women now enroll in higher numbers than men. But NPC sororities have always been different from other groups on campus.

Sororities have always been selective, somewhat mysterious, and for life. Many sorority alumnae will tell you that they are more attached to their sorority chapter than they are their alma mater. Sorority membership has been a significant and valuable part of the college experience for many women. It wasn’t just another club on campus. It was much more than that. It was a sisterhood. I experienced it and I know it to be true. There are no other clubs or organizations on campus that offer what an NPC sorority membership does. Nothing comes close.

As national sorority leadership councils decide to strip away the very elements that make sororities unique, they are basically signing the death warrant for their own organizations.

In the past, the threats to Greek life mainly came from without. Now the threats come from within. But this is exactly how it plays out in every organization that goes woke. Whether it is a knitting website, the new atheist movement, churches, or NPC sororities, the results are inevitable.

Get woke, go broke.

Will Any of the NPC Sororities Survive?

Will the NPC sororities survive? Yes, probably in some form. But they have some significant challenges ahead of them if they continue in this direction.

Running a sorority isn’t cheap whether you are talking about the national organization or an individual chapter. Budgets vary wildly depending on the campus, the housing situation, etc. But sororities have always depended on one thing – alumnae support. This support comes in three forms:

• money
• time
• promotion and networking

Sororities depend on generous alumnae donating money regularly. They depend on women volunteering their time to serve on local, regional, and national committees. And they depend on alumnae encouraging young women to join.

How many sorority alumnae who lean conservative are going to continue pouring money, time, and support into an organization that has turned its back on them and now preaches and openly promotes disdain toward them and their beliefs? A conservative woman would have to be insane to continue to actively support an organization that has forcefully pushed her aside and considers her views unacceptable. There are plenty of other organizations who would welcome her support.

If the conservative members opt to no longer participate in supporting the organization, will the more progressive members who remain fill those gaps? Time will tell. Do progressives know how to build? Or only change and destroy? How do you build something that will last when you remove all of the core values and replace them with something constantly in flux with no central guiding principle beyond the outrage of the month?

The question I am asking myself is whether or not any of the NPC sororities have leadership at the top who will recognize this and act quickly enough to save their organizations. I’m not involved enough any longer on the national level to know the character or strength of leadership of the 26 groups. I have no real knowledge on the matter beyond looking at websites and trying to gauge how far down the woke rabbit hole they have gone. (Some of them are really far down it in ways that are honestly beyond comprehension.)

However, if I were a betting woman and forced to put my money somewhere, I’d put my money on the NPC groups that have some combination of the following:

• strong national leaders who can endure heaps of verbal and written abuse and hang together through the storm
• strong presence in the South
• very strong alumnae network of multi-generational members and legacies
• concentration of their strongest collegiate and alumnae chapters in red states
• strong chapters in colleges and universities with strong and traditional Greek systems
• strong chapters in smaller and more conservative colleges

There are already chapters at very liberal colleges and universities wanting to disband and turn in their charter because they are so “ashamed” of the sorority they are a member of. I expect this will continue to accelerate as the Woke Religion gains more adherents on college campi and college students are filled with “shame” over their presence in something so evil as a sorority that selects its members on controversial criteria such as grade point and moral character.

I think the NPC groups that take this threat seriously will have to decide how many chapters they are willing to lose in order to save the organization. Sometimes you have to amputate to save the patient. It sounds harsh, but the Woke mob won’t stop or be appeased until they have destroyed the very organization they joined. NPC groups will have to decide where the future of their organization lies, make choices in line with that, and move forward in the consequences.

What Can Sorority Alumnae Do?

The first thing you have to decide is if you are willing to enter the fray. If you speak up against these changes, you will be attacked as all kinds of terrible things. You will be considered a racist. That’s simply a given. You will lose friends and sisters.

Is your sorority worth it? Do you care enough to try to stem the tide of change? That’s an honest question and there is no one right answer. It may not be worth it. Only you can answer that.

I have not resigned my membership in Tri Delta nor do I intend to. I cherish my membership and the values of Tri Delta. Before we had our daughter, I had Tri Delta named as a beneficiary in a particular situation. Although my involvement has been almost nothing for many years due to other needs in my life, my love for my sorority is real.

Whatever you decide to do, I think you owe it to your organization to contact them and make them aware of your views. Kindly, politely, and truthfully.

The Words of Sarah Ida Shaw Martin

Sara Ida Shaw was one of the two founders of Delta Delta Delta. On Thanksgiving Eve in 1888, she stood with Eleanor Dorcas Pond and they proclaimed the founding of Tri Delta on a street in Boston under a crescent moon. They had carefully planned out all of the details of this new sorority and would soon begin to add members. Although Sarah Ida Shaw had been invited to join other sororities at Boston University, she had chosen not to. Instead she founded her own and said this, a quote I have cherished since becoming a member:

“Let us found a society that shall be kind alike to all and think more of a girl’s inner self and character than of her personal appearance.” Sarah Ida Shaw

Sarah Ida Shaw Martin went on to be one of the moving forces in sorority life, consulting with other organizations, writing prolifically, etc. How sad she would be today to know that the NPC sororities she loved and assisted in so many ways are on the brink of throwing away the legacy passed on through generations.

The question that remains is whether or not there will be any sororities still around in another ten to fifteen years to provide women the opportunities and experiences enjoyed and appreciated by so many.

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